The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Computing devices continue to proliferate as there are greater and greater calls for computing power to be introduced into everyday devices and situations. Society continues to increase progress toward the “Internet of Things” (“IoT”), with its promise of ubiquitous computing availability in buildings, objects, spaces, etc. However, with the proliferation of IoT devices for home and business environments, managing and maintaining such devices threatens to become a daunting task. For example, oftentimes users may need to setup, register, or enroll new devices (e.g., smart light bulbs, smart thermostats, etc.) with an operating system or with one or more apps on personal mobile devices such as smartphones or tablets. In another example, a user might be connecting a new IoT device to a home WiFi network using a smartphone or a tablet. In another example, another user, such as another family member or friend, might need to access the same device either to control or share maintenance tasks. In both cases, oftentimes it is necessary for users' mobile devices to discover and identify the IoT device. While this discover and identification can be done through standard wireless discovery process such as WiFi scan or Bluetooth/BLE scan, doing a naïve scan in an IoT-rich environment could easily find tens or even hundreds of devices. This can turn an everyday task into a time-consuming ordeal.